Playwright and performer Ngozi Anyanwu, top, and performer Sullivan Jones work through a fight scene during a rehearsal at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s studios in Berkeley on March 11, 2026, for the upcoming production of “The Monsters.”
Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle
Mixed martial arts fighter Sijara Eubanks, center, talks through a warm-up for “The Monsters.”
Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle
The lead actors were already bouncing foot to foot before we entered the hexagonal mat. Mixed-martial arts fighters never stop moving. But be careful if you also try to emulate that stance for the first time, as I did. You might end up looking like you’re trying to dance an Irish jig.
Warm-ups are key for any actor. But for the performers in “The Monsters,” about a long-separated sibling pair who reconnect over MMA, a few minutes of push-ups, stretches, kicks and punches are just one more part of a round-the-clock full-body transformation.
Before warm-ups started at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where the show begins performances Friday, March 27, actors Ngozi Anyanwu — who’s also the playwright — and Sullivan Jones (“The Gilded Age”) listed their sore spots from previous rehearsal days.
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Choreographer Adesola Osakalumi, from left, performer Sullivan Jones, mixed martial arts fighter Sijara Eubanks and performer Carol McKenith warm up “The Monsters” rehearsal at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle
“Hips, shoulders — everywhere where a punch or kick is generated from,” Sullivan began.
“The Monsters”: Written by Ngozi Anyanwu. Directed by Tamilla Woodard. Performances begin Friday, March 27. Through May 3. $25-$135, subject to change. Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Peet’s Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley. 510-647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org
The groin, too. Calves for Anyanwu.
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Even off-hours are devoted to the body. “I’m in pigeon pose watching ‘The Pitt’ tonight,” Anyanwu said.
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There are no shortcuts in MMA training, points out former UFC fighter Sijara “Sarj” Eubanks, both the show’s MMA consultant and an inspiration for the script. Anyanwu interviewed her as part of her writing process for the show’s world premiere four months ago at Two River Theater in New Jersey.
When people ask Eubanks how to prepare for MMA, she says, gnomically, “Fighting is the best cardio for fighting.”
Guiding the leads, understudies, choreographer Adesola Osakalumi and me through a warm-up, Eubanks summoned the spoken-word rhythm of a coach and the world-historical voice of a movie trailer narrator: “It’s about explosions. It’s about tempo. It’s about flow.”
When we hoisted legs in the air, initiating kicks from the knee, she told us to envision how “a cobra snaps.” Then she bade us to do a kind of splits, but resting on the knees instead of the feet. My tendons and ligaments whinnied in moral outrage. I sent a pleading, panicked glance to Osakalumi. “Good morning!” he replied knowingly.
Theater critic Lily Janiak warms up with “The Monsters” cast members.
Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle
Eubanks, who retired from professional fighting in 2023, sees herself as a budding fight director now. “The MMA-to-theater pipeline isn’t something you hear about too often, but I’m happy to be pioneering it, I guess,” she said with a laugh.
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The Springfield, Mass., native initially got into fighting as a way to get fit as a student at Morgan State University in Baltimore. “It’s the coolest feeling in the world,” she said. “You’ve got to be your most animalistic self. You’ve got to really have no stops for 15 minutes.”
To give stage actors a crash course in her art form, Eubanks focused on the basics: breaking falls, maintaining a staggered stance, being so light on the feet that “you should be able to slide a Post-It under the heels.”
“We talk a lot about level changes,” she continued. “You’re standing tall for striking, and then you disappear to become shorter for grappling. The transition between those will definitely set your quads on fire.”
As a fighter, she memorized countless codes — numbers one through six stood for jabs, hooks and uppercuts, one number for each hand. Now she and Osakalumi use them, too.
Mixed martial arts fighter Sijara Eubanks warms up with fellow Berkeley Repertory Theatre artists for “The Monsters.”
Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle
“Those are the notes. Now that you know the notes, you can build whatever — compose your music,” she explained.
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Anyanwu, whose brother Azunna Anyanwu was also a pro MMA fighter, interviewed Eubanks to learn more about the experience of fighting professionally as a Black woman. One key takeaway, she recalled, is “She loves this thing that has not always loved her back.”
In the script, Anyanwu describes both Big, who begins the show a pro fighter, and Lil, a newcomer, as “strong, but not that tough.” Before rehearsal, she explained that the siblings share “the capacity to withstand.” At the same time, she added, they both put up a wall “so that something doesn’t get through, because actually, the thing that gets through could take them out.”
In rehearsal, Eubanks and Osakalumi were choreographing a sequence where Anyanwu’s Lil tries to get Jones’ much taller Big to fight her back. Anyanwu charged at Jones’ torso and threw a smattering of punches at his head. Eventually, the way Jones restrained her from fighting almost looked like he was holding her in his lap for comfort — a canny physicalization of the way, with family, one lashes out to seek succor.
Playwright and performer Ngozi Anyanwu warms up with fellow cast members during rehearsal for “The Monsters.”
Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle
Jones sees his character as pursuing MMA because “he understands that he is legible in this medium.”
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Big’s motivation, Jones said, is “I make sense to people as doing this. I become something that people go, ‘Yeah! Attaboy! Get him!’”
In fighting, he continued, “It’s a level playing field. It doesn’t matter if you were born in the ivory tower. So there’s some of that, too — of becoming the person I want to become, a kind of self-shaping.”
Anyanwu said Lil initially gets interested in fighting for the wrong reasons. But then, “She wins, and I don’t think she has won before” — in anything in life.
“She’s learning her capacity as she goes,” she said, “and she does not want to be stopped.”